The thing that has jumped out to me most during the rash of interviews accompanying Liz Truss' resignation and Rishi Sunak's coronation (sorry, "acclamation") is the excessive Conservative use of the passive tense, most often in the phrase "mistakes were made".
In that great trainwreck of a BBC interview with Liz Truss, she mentioned two or three times that "mistakes have been made" (more often than she mentioned that "I made mistakes"), and her replacement Rishi Sunak did the same in his acceptance speech.
Of course, this is standard speech-writing stuff, designed to deflect blame and to avoid admissions of guilt: mistakes were made and I just happened to be standing there at the time, so you can't really blame me for them. But it does nevertheless come over as entirely pusillanimous and abject, sorry-but-not-sorry.
I guess these people still have careers to continue in the short term, however poorly history will judge them, so maybe you can't blame them. Doesn't make it any more right, though.
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